The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As such systems become more complex, efficient and effective support for these systems has become increasingly important. Hardware configuration and connectivity issues are common problem areas within such systems. Likewise, hardware and connection information is additionally useful in determining other problems in the system. In this regard, it can be useful for support staff to have access to information relating to a user's backend hardware and communication links and connectivity. Conventionally, support staff may obtain hardware and backend connectivity information directly from a consumer/user; however, this is not always that helpful as the consumer may not know the answers, may not be educated or trained as to what to look for, may not know how to identify and/or explain the hardware or connections clearly, etc. Additionally, the information may not be available, at least not immediately available, to the consumer, particularly where one or more of the system components are remotely located or are otherwise not readily visible. In more recent methods, raw backend hardware and connectivity information may be received electronically by automatically monitoring the backend hardware and connections therebetween. However, such raw information is typically received as basic table information, or other basic text format, and the support staff need to manually dig through the received raw information in order to determine the backend hardware and connectivity configuration. The process of manually digging through this text data and determining the backend configuration is tedious, taking upwards of two to three hours or more, and consumes valuable customer support resources, thus reducing the efficiency of the support staff and increasing the time needed for resolving support issues.
Thus, there is a need in the art for increasing support staff efficiency for determining the identification and configuration of a consumer user's backend hardware and connectivity. More particularly, there is a need for diagramming hardware configurations, such as but not limited to, backend hardware configurations for a data storage center, in an interactive, graphic format that may be generated quickly and may be easily referenced for analysis and support.